


Chasm

by electricskeptic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-25
Updated: 2011-05-25
Packaged: 2017-10-19 21:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricskeptic/pseuds/electricskeptic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I believe it’s what you would call a tragedy, from the human perspective.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasm

**Author's Note:**

> This is, um. Kind of experimental, and partly meta dressed up as fic. The finale left me in a weird place.

“You’re not my family, Dean. I have no family.”

Dean wonders if there’s a possibility -- any at all -- that he’s dreaming. The setting is certainly nightmarish enough, but it’s a reality so warped he’s confident not even Zachariah would have been able to come up with it, if the bastard were still alive.

Castiel is not Castiel anymore; that much is painfully obvious. On the surface, he still looks the same, wearing that battered old trench coat and Jimmy Novak’s face. But there is a dissonance, something painfully _wrong_ about him. When he speaks, his voice has taken on a higher register, an almost childlike quality to it that sends a chill up Dean’s spine. The slightly manic aura he’s brought with him this past year has vanished, leaving behind a vacuum of dead space. There’s an odd cloak of serenity settled over his features; he is smiling, almost, but it’s an empty, vapid thing.

Still. It strikes Dean that in almost four years of knowing him, this is the first time he’s ever seen Castiel look as if he’s at peace.

This does not overshadow the fact that Castiel has gone completely fucking insane.

Dean wants to close his eyes against it, but he’s rooted to the spot, stuck staring in morbid, horrified fascination. _This is not Cas._ Cas is dead, only somehow Dean missed the funeral, and he can’t mourn with this thing standing in front of him, masquerading as his friend. He doesn’t want to see Castiel like this; he thinks of lingering stares, earnest comfort and shy, fleeting smiles, and _that’s_ the Cas he knows. _His_ Cas. Maybe Dean’s mental representation of him is a little skewed, because Castiel has never been particularly sweet or innocent, but even at his most ruthless there was an unshakeable _goodness_ about him, and it makes Dean a little sick that this is what it’s mutated into.

 _Was it my fault? Did I do this to you?_ But even Dean’s impressive well of guilt does not run deep enough for him to assume all responsibility. Castiel did this to himself. He chose this path, with eyes wide open; chose it with his own fucking free will.

However, Dean is a masochist at his core, and he can’t help but think if he had paid more attention, if he had noticed earlier that something was horribly awry, he could have pulled Castiel back from the brink before it was too late.

Now that he thinks back on it, the signs have been there all year. He just hasn’t been reading the map right.

+

A roadside in some podunk town that could be anywhere or nowhere at all, and Dean still has the acrid scent of 2014 in his nostrils. He curls a hand over Castiel’s shoulder, needing to feel him solid and unbreakable, the only one Dean can always lean on. Maybe too hard at times, but he knows that Castiel can take his weight.

“Don’t ever change,” he says, and means it.

+

Darkness is closing in around them; just as Hell had closed in around Sam, only Dean’s not thinking about that. He is grateful for Castiel’s presence on the journey to Cicero, even though he is certain the angel is only there to make sure he fulfils his promise to Sam and doesn’t drive into a tree. Sometimes (most times) Castiel frustrates him to the point of violence, but now Dean finds his company soothing. Even in spite of the circumstances.

“What are you gonna do now?” He asks to break the silence more than anything else.

“Return to Heaven, I suppose.”

 _Don’t do that,_ Dean wants to say. _Stay. Stay here with me._ But the words become tangled and stick in his throat; he can’t force them out past the dry, resistant mass that is his tongue. He can’t even begin to articulate the tension building up inside him, can’t decipher the tight, anxious feeling closing its fist around his chest, and so he lets Castiel go.

This is his first mistake, though it will be two years before he realizes.

+

Their fundamental problem is this:

Dean stands on one bank of a river, Castiel on the other. The river is deep -- fathomless, even -- but not particularly wide. They are separated by maybe twelve inches of swirling, brackish water. Dean knows that if he were to stretch a hand out, he could help Castiel across to his side, or vice versa.

Neither one of them moves. They continue to stare at one another across the void, each bone-jarringly afraid of taking that first step and reaching out, lest they should fall into the abyss.

+

Rivers of blood and fire that peels back the skin from his bones, bubbles the fat layer underneath. The chains that manacle him to the rack burn white-hot, and Alastair’s smile above him is a glittering, lascivious thing. This is all he is now: another broken-down soul in the Pit, because Castiel is not coming for him, not this time --

“Dean. Dean, wake up.”

The voice that pulls him back to consciousness is not the one he had grown used to over the last two years, nor the one he still secretly (shamefully) hopes for. Lisa leans over him, dark hair curtaining them from the world, face a concertina of worry. Her fingertips are cool touchstones against the fevered skin of his forehead; her other hand lands on his left shoulder, close to Castiel’s handprint. He can’t tell if the move is deliberate or not -- he knows she is fascinated by the mark, but he’d brushed her off whenever she asked where it came from until she took the hint and reluctantly dropped it.

“You were dreaming,” she tells him, smoothing back his hair. He bites down on a snappy _no shit,_ because it isn’t her fault and everything she’s doing for him goes way above and beyond the call of duty. She tugs at her bottom lip between even white teeth, and Dean knows she has more to say.

“Who’s Cas?”

His heart skips a beat, flailing in the bone cage of his ribs. He’s never mentioned Cas to her; never told her about the angel who built him up from ash and defied the will of Heaven just because he asked.

“You were… screaming, for someone named ‘Cas’ to come and save you. I just wondered.” Her shoulder jerks up and down, a nervous pantomime of a shrug; like it doesn’t matter, though he can tell she’s lit up with curiosity.

“No-one important,” Dean says after a pause, the biggest lie he’s ever told. He pulls Lisa down to his level and meets her lips, loses himself in her heat and tries to drive burning blue eyes and shadowed wings from his mind.

+

Caught in the ring of holy fire, Castiel is panicky and agitated in a way Dean has never seen before, had never even thought him capable of. His eyes are beseeching as he begs them to _understand,_ and it’s more than Dean can handle. It gives him the uncomfortable sensation that _he’s_ the traitor; that _he’s_ the one who’s been sneaking around behind everyone’s backs to make shady deals with the King of Hell.

“Dammit, Cas, we can fix this!”

“Dean, it’s not broken!”

 _Maybe not,_ Dean doesn’t say, _but **you** are._

+

An interlude: the sheets tangle about their waists, slipping and catching on sweat-damp skin. Somewhere out there, Dean knows Lucifer is planning his next move, but there has been a temporary lull in the fighting as of late. _Eye of the storm,_ Bobby had called it, but Dean isn’t thinking about that right now. Sam’s doing research at the library, and he’s finally got Castiel in his bed after months of watching and wondering what if.

The night is humid and stifling, even with the rain that hammers out a staccato rhythm against the windows. Dean traces winding pathways across the topography of Castiel’s body with fingers and tongue, tasting the hollow of his throat, the dip of his navel, the crease where hip meets thigh. When he pushes his way inside, Castiel’s breath hitches and his usually impassive face goes soft and stunned, like Dean is imparting some kind of wondrous gift.

They move together beautifully, fitting better against one another than they have any right to. Castiel feels small and vulnerable beneath his hands, deceptively so. Dean can’t quite block out the greedy, covetous part of him that is secretly glad of Castiel’s slow downward spiral into humanity, if it means that he gets to keep this. He thinks -- recklessly, dangerously -- that he would do just about anything to keep this.

“Dean,” Castiel breathes, enraptured, fingers feather-light against his jaw, and it is too much. Dean works his hips harder, faster, slips his tongue between the open gape of Castiel’s lips to chase the groans and whimpers that spill from them. Dean Winchester does not get to keep good things; they are ripped from him with bloody, brutal totality, time and time again.

He pushes their foreheads together, closes his eyes against the weight of Castiel’s soul-searching gaze. Even as jaded as he is now, Castiel still says Dean’s name like a prayer; still looks at him like this broken, wretched man will be their salvation.

Some days, it’s almost enough to make Dean believe it.

+

Hell clings to him like a second skin, something sulphurous and putrid that taints him so obviously he’s surprised people aren’t turning their faces away in disgust whenever he comes near. The scar on his shoulder burns with all the painful tenderness of new skin, and already he resents it. It’s too much like a brand, a claim of ownership from whatever new variety of evil had enough juice to drag him out of the Pit.

The thing -- _Castiel_ \-- doesn’t look like much, just some thirtysomething dude with messy hair and a rumpled suit, but its presence is such that every atom in the room resonates with it. It walks through a hail of bullets, takes Ruby’s knife to the chest without even flinching. With a fucking _smirk._

“I’m an angel of the Lord,” it tells him, and Dean’s reply is full of derision. Forty years in the flames is enough to break anyone’s faith, and he didn’t have all that much of it to begin with.

Castiel tells him as much, and then his wings are unfolding across the wall on a strobe of lightning, vast and ineffable, and Dean is humbled and terrified before this thing -- this _angel_ \-- that dragged him back to life.

+

Castiel pulls the sword out of his back -- the one that Sam just shoved there and, God, Dean doesn’t think he would have been able to do the same. He can’t decide whether to be horrified or ridiculously, overwhelmingly relieved that it didn’t work.

Castiel studies the blade with a kind of vague, detached interest that’s a million miles from his usual laser-like focus before setting it carefully aside. There isn’t even a trace of blood; the weapon is spotless and silver, sparkling even in the dim light.

“I’m glad you made it, Sam,” Castiel says, and it’s only now that his voice is so devoid of inflection that Dean realizes how expressive he’d become since their first meeting, “but the angel blade won’t work. Because I’m not an angel anymore.”

+

Dean is on his knees in the dirt in Stull Cemetery. Castiel’s fingers against his forehead send a peculiar warmth flooding his body, fixing all the broken parts of him, knitting skin back together and sliding bones back into their proper alignment until the only pain left is the one that’s coiled deep in his chest cavity where no angelic touch can reach.

He rises to his feet with slow caution and stares at what can only be called a miracle. If he looks across the cemetery to where Bobby’s prone body lays (and he’d honestly been trying not to) he can still see bloodied scraps of tan trenchcoat and torn pieces of flesh littering the ground. But Castiel is standing in front of him now, sympathetic and compassionate and alive, and the weight of it hits Dean like a punch to the solar plexus.

“Cas, are you God?”

Castiel’s mouth curves upwards just slightly, and there’s a spark of warmth and humor in his eyes that never used to exist. In different circumstances, Dean would have felt proud at having put it there.

“That’s a nice compliment, but no.”

+

There’s a dark brown mold stain on the ceiling of Bobby’s spare room that gets bigger every time Dean stays here. He fixes his eyes on it now, as though if he concentrates on it hard enough there won’t be room in his mind for more macabre thoughts.

Tomorrow, Sam says yes to the devil. This time it really is their last night on earth, but for once Dean has no desire to fuck the night away. He couldn’t get it up now even if he wanted to. Castiel’s rhythmic breaths from the dark space beside him are jarring, because each one only serves as a reminder to Dean that Castiel is human now, another thing he’s ruined.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this mess.” His voice is too loud, harsh in the way it cuts through the silence, and it makes him wince.

“Don’t,” Castiel snaps, and he sounds annoyed. At least that much hasn’t changed. “You don’t get to take responsibility for my decisions. That’s why it’s called free will.”

“Still,” Dean sighs, unable to put into words why all of this, everything, is his responsibility. His _fault._

But maybe Castiel doesn’t need to be an angel to be able to read him like a book. He shifts on the lumpy mattress so that they’re facing one another; Dean can just make out the thin scar that bisects Castiel’s eyebrow, a war wound that should never have been allowed to stay. Castiel cups the side of Dean’s face in an achingly tender way that has Dean wanting to lean in and flinch away from it all at once.

“I’m not a fool, Dean; I harbor no illusions that I’m going to live through this,” Castiel tells him, and Dean feels his heart clench a little at the frank manner in which he speaks of his own death. “But you should know that I have no regrets. And if I could go back in time and choose to side with you again, knowing everything I do now, I would do so in a heartbeat.”

“Then you’re a fucking idiot, Cas,” Dean retorts, and doesn’t bother trying to hide the break in his voice.

+

 _“I’m your new God. A better one. So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your Lord. Or I shall destroy you.”_

Dean feels his knees hit the ground before he realizes he’s sinking.

 _[end.]_


End file.
